


Ten by Ten

by Toiski



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Physical Disability, Physical Therapy, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, Platonic Relationships, Ten by Ten, Unreliable Narrator, non-sexual nudity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-02
Updated: 2017-12-02
Packaged: 2019-02-09 19:26:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12895059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toiski/pseuds/Toiski
Summary: Reaper and Widowmaker retreat to his room for a game of Ten by Ten. Their closest human contact is a reaffirmation of their inhuman physiologies. It is a calibration and a countdown. It is touching, and being touched, and putting it in words and numbers.





	Ten by Ten

I walked into the common room of the hideout, trying not to favor my left leg too obviously. Something in the ligaments wasn't right, and I could feel rough growths grinding together in the knee joint, but I couldn't afford to appear weak. I could deal with Talon easier from a position of power, and they were of use to me still.

Widowmaker was, as I had expected, seated at the table. Her rifle was already packed up, but her toolbox was open. She had her visor in one hand and was cleaning the lenses with an embroidered handkerchief. Two of the mercs were seated at another table, one focused on his nondescript mashed something of a lunch, the other smoking and sneaking glances at Widowmaker's cleavage. Dogs. If they had been conversing, they had stopped when they heard me coming.

"Widowmaker, " I growled. She flashed her eyes up to look at me, the barest acknowledgement, and I made our usual sign with my right hand, concealing it from the two mercs behind my body.. Fingers splayed open, then squeezed into a fist, then opened again. Even if the damn hacker was watching over the cameras, she wouldn't know it for what it meant. My sniper returned to her work, not responding in any visible way, but I knew she had understood and would comply.

It took a few minutes for her to finish up, while I waited, leaning against a wall. Taking the weight off my left leg eased that particular pain, but made me more aware of the hundred smaller aches and stings, so I leaned on it instead.

Widowmaker folded up the handkerchief carefully, exactly, with the finely detailed word "Amélie" on top. One could mistake it for nostalgia, if one didn't know Widowmaker. In this thing, as in everything else she did, she was methodical. Unchanging. My polar opposite. She was frozen in time at the border of life and death, while I crossed it daily, regenerating to die again. I reached for a poetic thought, something suitably nihilistic, but the words fell, clattering, into the emptiness.

Meanwhile, she had finished her tasks and gathered up her kit. She walked out first, and I followed, my coat flaring behind me as I spun on my heel. It was such a shame that I couldn't properly enjoy walking behind Widowmaker. Nothing stirred in me.

We reached my room, and I let her in. She arranged her equipment by the wall, rifle on top, and pulled off her gloves. I opened the cover of a metal box attached to the power cables running along the wall. When I flicked the protected switch, the room darkened as all the electronics were simultaneously shut down. Even that self-serving hacker couldn't enter a completely dead system. In the slim beam of light from the doorway, I pulled a few candles and a lighter out of a drawer. Wordlessly, I tossed them over to her, and she deftly caught them. She began to light the short, stubby candles while I closed and locked the door, sealing us off from prying eyes.

I knew the mercenaries had their own ideas of what was going on during our hours of seclusion, and it amused me. As long as they never suspected the truth, they could make up whatever teenage fantasies they wanted.

Widowmaker had set up the candles, and the scene was almost romantic, but the mood remained somber. I shrugged off my coat and hung it on a peg, then began to tug at my gloves, ineffectually. My gnarled fingers couldn't get a proper grip, and my hands were swollen and distended.

Widowmaker heard me grumbling to myself, and set the last candles down. She stepped up to me, placing her cool hands atop mine, and began to undress me. The gloves, the vambraces, the compression sleeves, all came off with practiced ease, while she looked into my eyes, and I into hers. She began to softly glide her fingers over my knuckles.

"Four by five," I told her. She nodded, turning my hands palm up, and pressed softly on the pads of my forefingers and middle fingers. "Five by five." She pressed her thumbnails into my palms, hard enough to pierce the leathery skin and draw blood. I hissed, spitting out a strained "Eight by four."

All this time, her eyes never left mine. I could tell my pain gave her no pleasure, not like the pain of those she hunted. As she alternated light and heavy touches, soft and hard, I growled out then numbers. When I gave a four by seven for her gliding her fingernails up the outsides of my little fingers, she demanded "again." I repeated myself, but her emotionless eyes were able to see something even through my mask.

"Fine, then. Three by six." Those numbers had been higher during our last session of Ten by Ten. I could never get a lie past her here, but when it was my turn to question her, she was entirely bared to me as well. Her fingers interrogated me, ghosting up my forearms, then across my biceps and triceps. She pressed her cold body against mine, and I rested my hands on her hips. When I finished my account with a "Six by eight" for her fingernails pricking my deltoids, she gave me a pat on the shoulders. It wasn't a friendly gesture, just a signal that we were done there.

She slid out from under my palms, and peeled off the top half of her body glove. She tied the sleeves loosely around her waist, and stepped closer again, offering up her hands. I began testing the feeling in her right hand, supporting my wrists against each other to better control the force I put into my touch.

A year ago I didn't need to do that. A few years from now, I'd probably lose the ability to aim and fire my shotguns. Every time I passed through the shadows to be formed again, I left a little bit of me beyond the veil. I was like a book, rewritten on new paper to replace the stained and crumbled previous edition, steadily accumulating little errors, additions and omissions. Still, the book told the same old story of revenge, and I planned to exact it within the year. I could hold myself together that long.

Widowmaker was responding well today. "Three by eight." She had hardly changed in the years since her initial transformation. She might not change for some decades. "Three by seven". Her sensitivity numbers were low by design, a result of intentional numbing rather than my layers of scar tissue and raw, new flesh. They could be adjusted, whereas mine were a countdown. "Four by nine." Closer to her slow-beating heart, both the sensitivity and specificity of sensation increased, and when I lightly pinched the flesh on her chest, I received a few five by nines and four by tens. Her voice remained steady, while my breathing quickened slightly with half-remembered passions.

Widowmaker reached up to remove my mask, but I grabbed her wrists roughly. "That won't be necessary," I told her. I knew she felt no horror at the sight of my visage, but I worried that I had grown too used to letting her see. Her lack of reaction and tender touch were precisely what made it dangerous. It was tempting to pretend I was human during our private moments, but it could only slow me down. Taking my mask off was a waste of time.

Instead, I shoved her in the direction of the bed, and she fell down to sit on the thin mattress. She raised a single eyebrow in question, and I responded with a minute shake of my head. I knelt in front of her and began to unbuckle her boots. Best to just focus on finishing round one of Ten by Ten. We still had some ice cubes in my freezer for round two and molten wax from the candles for the finale.

**Author's Note:**

> The game of Ten by Ten is modeled on a practice of the same name in Wildbow's web serial novel Worm. (It's about wanting to do the right thing in a world of superheroes and supervillains and unrelenting escalation. Go read it.) I reinterpreted Defiant's and Dragon's game of Ten by Ten and took it in a weird direction. Reaper and Widowmaker are a pair of broken people, but they can be a little less broken when they're alone together, and that's cute. Right? Or is it just me that thinks so?


End file.
